Hiretsuna
by DarkFaerieNyroc13
Summary: My soul screeches as it breaks apart. I feel the human part of it break away and leave my body. A hollowness takes its place and settles itself into the space between my ribs, and I know in that moment that the darkness will never leave. [Rated MA for violence, language, and sensitive material. Reader discretion is advised.]
1. Hesitation

**Hey everyone. Thanks for stopping in.**

 **This is the first in a trilogy. Naruto content is light for the first story, but it's in there regardless. Therefore, I must say that I don't own Naruto. If I did, I probably wouldn't be writing fanfiction for it.**

 **Feedback is always appreciated. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Feel free to contact me.**

 **Disclaimer: Content is rated for mature adult (MA) audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.**

 **-Nyroc**

* * *

 _It takes me a few moments to remember how to breathe. The numbers have been called that seal our fate. I should have been prepared for this, but I still feel like the world has dropped straight from beneath my feet._

" _It's your turn, little shadow."_

 _The teasing hiss behind me shakes me from my stupor and I have no choice but to step forward. The hatred in those words make me want to turn and kill the girl who spoke them. I'm not a killer. I've never been a killer. Still, I wish I had been paired up with her. I wish I had been paired up with anyone else._

 _The snow is cold enough to numb my feet as I walk through it, moving to the designated area that's been cleared. It's a flat expanse of stone, cleared of snow and bordered by crumbled walls. It is far from the prying eyes of my classmates. Rocks lay strewn about. It used to be a place of worship, but up close I can see that the grey is stained with copper and brown._

 _It's the color of aged blood that has seeped deep into the stonework. If I cracked the rocks open, they'd probably be red all the way through._

 _My heart drops down into my belly._

 _We aren't going to fight each other to demonstrate our skills._

 _We're going to fight to the death._

 _I look over at him and watch as the realization hits him, too, and dread seeps into his eyes._

 _I'm not a killer._

 _I've never been a killer._

 _But even if I was, I don't think I'd be able kill my best friend._

 _They did it on purpose. The numbers weren't random. They did it on purpose. They did it on purpose._

 _The sharp-eyed woman standing atop the crumbling pile of ruins crosses her arms over her chest._

" _Begin."_

 _We have no choice but to begin fighting as soon as time is called._

 _There is no hesitation in Hiretsuna._

* * *

Somebody yells words at me that I don't know. After my eyes get used to the bright I stare at the man without a clue of what I'm supposed to do. He stops yelling at me a minute later and just grabs my shoulders again, then shoves me forward. I climb up wooden stairs on my hands and knees because the chains on my ankles make it hard to walk.

I'm on a raised platform made of wood that puts splinters into my feet. It's a little like a stage, but not the same. It's not as nice. The crowd of people below me yells things at me in words I don't understand. Soon the yelling turns to just two people shouting back and forth at each other. One man stops his shouting, and the man who pushed me earlier yells something at him. Then he pushes me back down the stairs, and I see another girl a little younger than me going through the same thing.

The pushy man makes me walk to a place with a fence making a circle around it. There's a fire in the middle. I want to get closer to that fire. The air has been cold since they took me off of the boat. I trip a bunch of times to get to the line that I have to stand in to get to the fire. My hands seem even colder the longer I have to wait, because they know that they'll get warmed up soon.

I'm a little surprised when two big men grab me by the arms, which make my hands hurt where the metal chains are digging into my skin. How am I supposed to get close to the fire to warm up my hands this way? It's almost like

All of the sudden I can't see anything because the back of the shoulder of the arm that I write with hurts so bad I can't do anything but kick my legs and scream and try to get away. And then the men let me go and I run into the fence and I hold it and I cry because my shoulder is on fire and I'm going to die because it hurts so bad. I wish something would make it stop. I keep screaming and crying and I hear more footsteps behind me and more yelling and more words and then

When I wake up, I'm in another little room that has three walls made out of rock and one wall made out of metal bars going up and down. This room isn't as dark as the other one was and it's a little bit warmer here, but not that much. The room is empty. There's no bed, no window, not even straw. My hands and feet are still cold. The chains aren't on my hands and feet anymore. My head hurts in the back like when I bumped it on a rock when I was little.

My shoulder still hurts like fire. I turn my head around to look at it. There's an ugly bumpy blister there, like when I burned my finger on the tea pot when I was littler, but it's bigger than when it was just on my finger. It's a circle with two lines going back and forth across it. It covers the whole back of my shoulder, to where the skin pops up in the middle of my back when my arm moves. It's ugly and it hurts even more when I move my arm. I figure out that if I lay down on the rock floor underneath me, it's cold and it makes it not hurt as much. What did I do to deserve this?

I don't get it.

I stay in the little dark room with the metal fence for a long time before a grown-up man opens the fence and pushes a boy inside with me. A little bit longer and he pushes in two more girls. Then the big man leaves and the four of us just stare at each other for a long time.

The boy talks in words that I don't know. One of the girls talks back to him with the same words. From what I can see in this room with only a little bit of light in it, they both have brown hair and I can't see the color of their eyes, but maybe they're brothers and sisters. I have a big brother, but I don't want to think about that right now.

The other girl doesn't get what they're saying either, so she looks at me for a long time. She has dark-colored hair and light-colored eyes, but that's all I can tell. Maybe she knows how to talk like I do.

"What's going on?" I ask her.

She shakes her head at me and lifts her shoulders in an up-and-down way. My big brother used to do that. He said it means 'I don't know.'

"I'm Kurai. What's your name?" I say to her.

She shakes her head at me again, then crawls across the cold floor to where I'm at and opens up her mouth in my face. I scream.

Her mouth is dark and she smells like blood. Her tongue is just a little stump at the back of her mouth. I've never met anybody without a tongue before.

The boy pulls her away from me, and she screams at him and holds her shoulder. I see that she has the same mark there that I do. So do the other two children there with me.

The boy tells me something with those strange words and noises. I don't get it. I tell him so and he covers my mouth with his hand.

Oh. I guess he wants me to be quiet.

The big man walks by the wall of metal bars, pushing more children like the four of us. Some are bigger, some are smaller. All of them look sad and are wearing the same kind of rags that we are. I stay quiet until they pass, then look up at the boy again.

His eyes are bright, bright green in the dark cell. It's almost like they're glowing.

I stare at him for a long time until the hall outside is quiet and and the room starts to go cold. Then, he scoots over to where I'm sitting with the girl who can't talk. The other girl who I think is his sister crawls over too.

The girl who doesn't talk watches me. I stare back.

"Do you know what I'm saying to you?" I ask her. Her head moves up and down. "What's your name?"

She looks down at the cold floor and starts to write kanji in the dust there. Her name is Kotori. Little bird. It fits because she's littler than me and she looks kind of like a bird.

I put my hand on my chest and look at the other two children. "Kurai," I tell them. I point to the quiet girl. "Kotori."

The two of them look at me like I have blue skin and five arms. Then, slowly, the other girl with brown hair puts her hand on her chest.

"Sileny."

I nod my head up and down at her. Then I look at the boy.

He points to himself and tells the others and me, "Ataeru."

That's a funny name, but I don't tell him that. He won't know what I'm saying anyways.

Then the quiet girl Kotori moves over and cuddles up into my side like I used to do with my big brother. She's shivering. I put my arms around her and cuddle back. It gets really cold in that room, really fast. I close my eyes and lean back against the cold rock wall and try to sleep.


	2. Mercy

****Hey all.****

 ** **I'll be reformatting the story to make the chapters longer so I'm not quite as squashed toward the end. The content for the new chapters 2 and 3 is the same as chapters 2-3 and 4-5, respectively.****

 ** **Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Content is rated for mature adult (MA) audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.****

 ** **-Nyroc****

* * *

 _ _My mind races as I go through possible solutions in my head, but no amount of strategic practice could have prepared me for this. We could tag-team the man and woman supervising us and make a run for it, but they are armed and we are not. That, and there's nowhere to go. We're at least a week from the nearest village, and even if we somehow survived the barren, icy wasteland, there's nobody who would take us in. They'd probably kill us on sight.__

 _ _Still, I wonder if maybe that would be better than this. Then, we would die at the hands of strangers, instead of at the hands of friends.__

 _ _I can see the same dilemma racing back and forth in his eyes as well, but we both know there is no way around this. There is no escape. There is no way to save both of us. There is no way this ends well.__

 _ _There is no mercy in Hiretsuna.__

* * *

All four of us stay in that dark, cold little room for so long my nails grow past the ends of my fingers. That's never happened to me before because Mama always kept them neatly trimmed. I chew the nails down until they hurt.

None of us have eaten anything since we got here. Ataeru and Sileny talk to each other quietly, but Kotori is too tired to play clapping or drawing games with me. Her tummy is always growling now. My tummy hurts sometimes too, but I try not to let it bug me.

My shoulder feels a little better lately. It doesn't really hurt that much anymore, but it itches real bad sometimes. But when I try to write in the dirt on the floor my arm starts to hurt after a while where they put that hot metal thing on it.

Whenever I try to make pictures in the dust, the boy Ataeru always tries to make me use my bad hand. I don't like it. I try to tell him so and he draws a picture in the dust with lines. It looks a little like a girl on fire. He keeps saying the same word over and over again. I just shake my head at him because I don't get it. He keeps calling me that word that I don't like, and when I tell him I don't like that, he points to the hand I write with. He says that word again, and I get it. Writing with my good hand is bad here.

From then on I try to write with my bad hand, the one that doesn't hurt. It's hard, but Ataeru stops calling me bad things and I like that.

The girl Sileny is quieter than Ataeru, and now I don't think they're brothers and sisters. She's nicer. She draws pictures on the floor for me and says words to go with them. I think she's trying to teach me how to talk like she does. The words feel funny in my mouth.

Even with the talking and the drawing, the days are long.

When the big man comes back again I'm so hungry and thirsty and tired I can hardly see in front of my face. I don't feel so good. He pushes me like he always does and I walk until I'm in a big yard with a metal fence and a lot of other children like me. The snow on the ground is cold on my bare feet. The big man shoves me to a little table with a few other children and leaves to go get the other three from my room.

In the middle of the table there's a wooden box. I see little bits of fuzz poking out of the cracks in the sides, and there's the tip of an ear sticking out of the top of it. Bunnies! I love bunnies.

Once everyone's outside in the big yard, grown-ups come over and open up the boxes. Everybody gets a bunny. Mine has grey fur and a white patch around her little pink nose. She's so cute.

Then the grown-up by our table pulls out shiny metal knives and sets one by every one of us children. Big brother taught me never to touch knives, but everybody else is picking them up because the grown-ups are telling them to. The metal is cold against my hand.

And then the man by our table does something real, real bad.

He takes a bunny out of the box and puts it on its back on the wooden table. Then he takes the shiny metal knife and cuts its belly open. The bunny squeaks and kicks at him, and its white fur turns red. The bad man keeps cutting it over and over again until the bunny's insides start to come out. Then he stabs the knife through the bunny's belly and leaves it there, stuck to the table. The bunny keeps kicking and squeaking and splashing blood everywhere until it finally stops moving and dies.

Then, the bad man points to a boy at my table who looks a little older than me. The boy looks down at his bunny, then up at the man, then back at his bunny. And then he picks up his knife and he does the same thing.

All around me the world starts to spin and fill with screaming bunnies and blood smell and shiny metal knives. I feel like I can't get enough air.

The bad man tells me something in his words and I don't get it, but he points to the knife in my hand and then to the bunny and I feel like I'm going to fall over. Big brother told me never to hurt anything unless it's going to hurt me. This bunny hasn't done anything bad to me. I shake my head at the bad man. He yells at me, and I put the knife down and hold my bunny close to me.

The bad man pulls the bunny from my arms and puts it in the box, and then he drags me up to a big table in the front of the yard. There's a big stick in the middle of it. He takes my short brown dress off over my head and pushes me up onto the table. He uses rope to tie my hands to the big stick.

My knees shake because I'm cold and I'm naked and everyone is staring up at me. All I can think of is that bunny. The bad man wanted me to kill the bunny, to hurt it. I don't get it. Why would

All I can feel is pain. My back hurts. There's a whole straight line of hurt that goes all the way across my

Another line of fire goes

Another big hurt pain

Ano

Another

Anoth

Another

An

Another

Another

.

.

.

.

.

My toes are very cold when I start to breathe again. I can't see anything because the hurt all over my back makes it not possible. All I see is white. I think the bad man cuts the rope off of my wrists, because I fall down on my knees. Then I feel something cold in one hand and something warm and soft in the other.

I open my wet eyes.

The bad man gave me my bunny and my knife back. He crosses his arms over his chest and stares at me real angry.

He still wants me to hurt the bunny.

Everybody watches as I push the bunny down on the wooden table I'm sitting on and dig the shiny metal knife into its soft grey fur. Everybody watches as I do it again and again until it screams at me and kicks so hard its guts fly out and hit me in the chest and belly and its blood sprays across my face. Everybody watches me stab the knife into the bunny and the wood and watch as it kicks and screams and dies. The world is quiet and smells like blood. My face feels wet and my lips are dry and cracked and salty.

The bad man pulls me off of the table and puts the dress back over my head. The itchy cloth burns against my back. He pushes me into a line of children. I wait until my toes feel like they will fall off, and then a grown-up girl takes my hand in hers. I want to cry because her skin feels like a fire to my cold hand.

She turns my arm over, takes her shiny metal knife, and cuts a line into my wrist. I yell at the hurt of it. She pushes me after the other children, and the bad man takes me back to the room I share with the three others. When he's gone, I hug my knees against my chest and cry while Kotori brushes my hair with her fingers.

I want to die.

* * *

It hasn't been a whole day when they come to get us again. They take us to a different yard and we throw rocks at wooden boards painted with dots and rings. The children who hit the middle of the dots get to go to a line where two grown-up girls give them little bowls that look like they have food in them. The children who don't hit the middle of the dots keep throwing rocks until they hit them. The children who miss the painted rings all the way get hit across the shoulders or back with a stick that's long and is as wide as my thumb.

I miss for three hands and two fingers. I can't count that high by myself. My body hurts bad because they keep hitting me on my back where they hurt me earlier.

After a long time I hit the middle of the dot and I get a little bowl of something brown. It smells a little like the bean paste Mama used to put inside of her dumplings. I eat it fast because it's warm and I'm so hungry. It tastes bad, but I don't care.

When we leave the yard, the grown-ups cut another line in our wrists. That makes two.

* * *

By the time my nails go past the tips of my fingers again, I have forty-three lines cut into the arm that I'm still learning to write with. I know this because Ataeru can count that high and he told me so. I don't know how many days have passed since we got here. The lines go all the way up to my elbow now.

I can see the bones in Kotori's chest now, and the little bumps on her sides from her ribs. Ataeru and Sileny are starting to look like that too. I wonder if I'm getting that skinny. I know that I'm hungry all the time because we only get food on every fifth exercise session, and that's a little bowl of brown stuff. It used to taste bad, but now it tastes like the best thing I've ever eaten because it's warm and fills my belly. For a little bit, I can be full.

Every morning they take us outside before sunrise and make us run around and around and around a fenced yard until the sun reaches its highest place in the sky. It hurts my legs and my body gets so cold because it's cold outside. I run until my feet crack and bleed. A few of the children have toes that turn black and break off like icicles. That scares me a little. I don't want to lose my toes.

When we're done running for the day, I cough and cough and throw up because I can't get enough air, but it's okay because my tummy is empty and so there's no food to waste, just yellow water that foams on the snow. Big brother taught me never to be wasteful. I scoop up snow with my hand and let it melt on my tongue while I wait to get another line on my arm, because the snow is cold and I'm thirsty.

When I get to the end of the line, it's the bad man this time. He turns my hand over and cuts a line right into the bend in my elbow. It hurts and I flinch, but I stopped yelling and crying a while ago. Now I know what's coming when they pull out the shiny metal knives.

They take us back to another yard. They make us kill bunnies again, but they let us keep our knives. This time, they make us cut the lines ourselves. I don't cut deep enough and they make me do it over again, but at least they don't tie me to the pole and whip me again. Last time they gave me ten whippings. I know because Sileny counted the ugly marks.

When we get back to our room, I use the knife to carve eight lines into the dirt on the rock wall. One for each bunny I've killed.

They take us outside again after we've gotten our breath back to normal and wiped the blood off of ourselves. They make us run again. Back and forth across a field, as fast as we can, over and over and over. I'm a little happy that I'm one of the faster children. But then I start to get tired and they keep making us run. I run and run until I throw up again, and then I keep running. My whole body hurts. My feet are bleeding again when we finally stop.

We cut our arms again and go straight to another fenced area. There are wooden posts wrapped with the kind of cloth that we're wearing. The kind that used to hold Mother's rice and yams in the bottom of the pantry. There's fluffy stuff beneath the cloth. I think it's the fur from all of the bunnies we've killed, but I don't know.

We line up in groups and take turns hitting the padded posts until our palms hurt and our arms shake. The grown-ups teach us how to make our hands into balls to hit harder. I ask Ataeru what it's called in his talk, and he tells me it's a 'punch'. I think my big brother told me that before.

A grown-up girl who I know as Mouseface comes over and hits the backs of our hands with a stick for talking. A red line shows up on my skin, and I know that it will bruise before dark.

When it's my turn again, I punch the post until my palms and knuckles tear open and start to bleed all over the place. A grown-up who has no eye on one side of his face pulls me away from the post and sits me with a group of children who all have bleeding hands. I bury mine in the snow to make them stop hurting.

They make us line up again and we do push-ups and sit-ups and things called 'planks' for a long, long time. I've done push-ups and sit-ups before. I used to do them with my big brother. I'm good at them, but we do so many of them that I can't do any more of them. When I fall onto my belly, Mouseface hits me across the shoulders with her stick. When I can't do another sit-up, the boy without an eye hits me in the shins until I do one more, and one more after that. When I balance on my toes and my hands and push my body up into a plank and I hold it until my belly droops to the ground and my arms shake, the bad man hits me across the backs of my legs until I make my body straight again. My whole body shakes and hurts, but we do the sets again and again and again until I can't even get up when they tell us to stop.

They make us do punches again. A few of the children throw up.

They make us do sit-ups and push-ups and planks again. A few children faint like me.

Mouseface pulls me up to my feet and cuts my arm for me and helps me and Sileny get back to our room. We leave bloody footprints in the snow.

My toes are blue and my feet are cracked and bleeding. My fingers are blue. I can't feel anything at all with them, even after I warm them up with my breath. I think maybe the feelers in them died. My body hurts and shakes from being tired and cold. I have bruises everywhere. I can hardly stand the pain in my back.

Sileny's fingers and toes are blue now, and some of the cuts on her arm are puffy and red and covered with yellow scabs. She cries whenever I try to look at them. I say a prayer that her toes don't fall off and that her arm stops being nasty.

Kotori's breath stinks like blood and rotten meat. When she lets me look at where her tongue used to be, there are black and white and red and purple spots all over the back of her mouth. I don't think it's good.

Ataeru looks the worst of all of us. The tips of his ears are black, and he has dark purple circles under his eyes. When he coughs, blood comes out. It used to be just a little, but now it's getting to be more and more. His knuckles are so hurt from the punching that I can see the bones in places. The arm with all of the cuts on it has little green and red and purple lines all over it like little tree branches. I think his fingers and toes are going to fall off.

We curl up and try to sleep, but none of us are well enough to dream.

* * *

I don't know exactly how long it's been since they brought us here, but I think it's been about a year. The snow got thicker, then thinner, then melted a little. Little sprouts of plants poked up through the white for a while. Then the snow got thicker again and the plants were buried and I guess they died. It's snowing right now. I think it's fall or winter again, but it's hard to tell because there's always snow on the ground here.

The cuts on my arm aren't just on my arm anymore. They went all the way up to my shoulder on the inside, then started a new row of them on the outside. They're like that on the other arm too, the arm I used to write with but don't anymore so I don't look like a witch. Ataeru says that's the side that's left, but I can't ever remember which is which. The cuts go all the way across my back where my shoulders are and make little lines on my collar bones. Mostly those are just dark little scars now. I made most of them myself, because the adults told me to. Ever since we all ran out of room on our arms and shoulders and chests, we've been making them on our legs, the ones that Ataeru tells me are correct. Or maybe it's right. I can never remember the word for it. I don't cry or pull away or even flinch when I get my cuts now. They hurt, but I don't show it.

I can talk in their language now. It's still hard for me to understand sometimes because the words are so different and a lot of times the adults and some of the other children talk really fast. But I can usually do it okay. Kotori still doesn't try to talk, but she can use her hands to tell me what she wants. The adults don't let me talk to her in our language anymore. I'm not allowed to use it.

I'm faster and stronger now. I can run two hundred and twelve laps around the big yard in one hour. I know because I can count that high now in both languages. Ataeru taught me how to. I don't throw up anymore when we run. I always hit the painted targets in the middle. I broke my first padded post two sessions ago. The adults gave me an extra helping of food for doing so good. I can do three hundred sit-ups without stopping. I can do fifty-six push-ups. I can hold a plank for four and a half minutes. I can do sixty leg-lifts without getting tired.

When we look at ourselves now, we're still skinny, but our muscles stand out under our scarred skin. Our cuts don't get infected as much anymore. We usually don't get sick anymore. The ones who do get sick are dead within six sessions.

Sixty-three of us have already died out of the hundred and fifty-two that began. Ataeru and I counted them. Sileny and I keep track of the dead next to where I used to tally the number of bunnies I hurt and tortured and killed. I got up to seventy before we moved on to other things. Lately, the adults have provided us with birds, fish, and mice. Once we had cats. That was harder because they fought back. Mine gave me a scar right across the bridge of my nose.

When the adults come to get us for our target session, they tell us that we're not going to use rocks this time. We're going to use our shiny metal knives. The man with one eye, who Mouseface calls Riktor, shows us how to hold the knives by the blade and throw them. I miss the first few times and they hit me in the shoulders with their long, thin sticks. On the sixth try I hit the bottom of the outside ring. The knife hits the wood by the handle and falls into the snow. My forehead wrinkles up in confusion. I don't get it. Riktor's knife stuck in straight by the blade. What did I do wrong?

Riktor smacks my shoulders with his stick, and I run to go get my knife and bring it back. I hold it by the blade and get ready to throw it again, but Riktor stops me before I can. He moves my fingers to a different grip. He tells me to bend my wrist more when I throw. I do and it cuts my fingers open, but the knife sticks into the wood by the tip. It stays for a second before it falls, but Riktor doesn't hit me again. I need to practice so my arm gets stronger.

The sky is black when they tell us to stop because we can't see the targets anymore. My bare feet went numb a long time ago. My fingers are full of cuts from the first few throws. I can see my breath even in the dark. I can't feel my ears or my nose. We line up to go back to our rooms. I get down onto one knee and carve a line across my shin with my shiny metal knife. It's a lot deeper than usual because my hands have no feeling in them. Blood trickles down the front of my leg from the wound in five thick lines. Mouseface tells me to pack snow on it and I do. The bleeding stops an hour after we get back to our room.

All four of us sleep together in a pile to keep warm. All of us are too tired even to dream.

When they wake us up again before the sun rises, the cut on my leg is angry and red and it hurts a lot. The scab cracks and the cut starts bleeding again once we get into the big yard. I pack more snow on it, but that doesn't help with the bleeding. Mouseface tears a strip of cloth from the bottom of my dress. I blush a little because now the dress is above my knees by a few inches, and Mama taught me never to show my knees. She wraps the cloth around my leg and ties it tight. The cut stops bleeding after a few minutes, but it still hurts when we start running. We run for four hours. I do eight hundred and fifty-five laps. I got faster.

My toes are blue and have no feeling when we stop. My shin is covered in blood because the cloth bandage is leaking. I don't feel very good because I can't breathe. My head is swirling around.

Mouseface comes over to me and makes me sit with my head beneath my knees until my world stops tipping all over. When I feel better, I go with the others to do sit-ups and push-ups and everything else. I'm more careful when I cut the next line in my leg. This time, it's not deep enough, so I do it over and over again in the same spot until it's just right.

We go to kick posts again. Now, they look a little like people and have faces drawn on them. Then we sprint back and forth, do more push-ups and planks and sit-ups and other things, and carve more lines into our legs. Then we wait to get our little bowls of food because it's been five sessions.

Riktor stands in front of us and tells us to wait to eat. He shows us how to dig through the snow until we get to the dirt underneath. He shows us how to dig up enough to fill our hands twice. It's hard to do because the ground is frozen solid. He tells us to mix the dirt into our food.

It's gross, but I do it anyways because I know I'll get hit if I don't.

Riktor makes us put the snow back over the holes before we eat. It tastes worse than usual because of the dirt, but it makes my stomach much fuller. I don't mind it so much then. I swallow snow after it. I can feel its cold all the way down to my belly, but I don't care. It washes down the dirt and keeps me from being thirsty.

Thirty-nine sessions later, the cut on my leg is red and puffy and angry and it hurts to touch. It still bleeds and it drips cloudy yellow slime. The skin around it is streaked with little black lines that look like ink on wet paper. I squeeze the blood out of the bandage and wrap it tighter this time to make the cut stop bleeding. My skin is covered in a thin layer of cold sweat.

Sileny tells me that it's infected. She says I'm going to die. She says that I should tell Mouseface or Riktor about it. I tell her to be quiet because if they find out, they'll kill me. There was a boy a few weeks ago with a cut like mine, and after he told them about it he didn't come back. We saw them carry his body out into the snow.

After our morning run, I'm dizzy again and I throw up. My whole body is shaking. I sit down in the snow with the others and shiver, hugging my legs to my body.

I see Riktor after a few seconds of looking. He has a long scratch on his arm that's pretty deep. He digs dirt out of the ground with his shiny metal knife and mixes it with snow in his hand until it melts and turns into mud. Then he smears it across the cut.

I make another cut in my leg before they take us to throw our knives again. While I'm waiting for my turn, I take the bandage off of my leg. The cut is still oozing yellow goo. I use snow to clean it away and numb it. Then I dig up dirt like they taught us to do for our food and mix it with the snow like how Riktor did. I frown when it doesn't melt because my hands are too cold. I breathe on it until it turns watery, then mix it into mud. I smear it onto my cut. The mud is cold, but it feels much better as soon as I put it on. I cover my hole with snow and put the bandage back on over my cut.

I wait for another few minutes and take my turn throwing my knife. Riktor and Mouseface and the bad man watch me throw. I don't hit the middle, but I don't miss either. My knife sticks farther and farther into the painted wooden target the more times I throw it.

When we're done and we make our cuts, now over my knee, we walk through the cold snow to a new fenced yard. It's mostly clear of snow and there are plants sticking up out of the ground. Mostly they're little shrubs and grasses and flaky things that Sileny tells me are called 'lichen'. There's a tree to one side with leaves that look like needles and that is a little taller than me.

Mouseface tells us what every plant in the yard is and what it's used for. She tells us not to forget. We practice saying what they are and what to do with them over and over until I know what everything looks like and does. She shows us a plant that she calls Nightbreath. She tells us never to eat it or put it on our wounds because it's poisonous.

She shows us a plant that has little green buds at the base of every leaf. It's called Witchwood. She tells us that if we take the buds and chew them up and put them on our wounds, it'll draw the poisons out of our blood. I think about the cut on my leg with the inky black streaks. When Mouseface and the bad man look away, I pick as many buds as I can in the few seconds that I have and shove them in my mouth. I hide them under my tongue so that they won't find them. They taste bad, but I don't care. I think I'll die without them.

When Mouseface is done teaching us about the plants, we cut our legs and line up to be taken back to our rooms. Riktor pulls me by my arm, but he doesn't take me to my room. He takes me down another hallway and into a different room with a wooden table to one side and a fireplace on the other. The room is very warm, and my toes start to thaw a little bit on the rock floor. He picks me up and sits me on the table, then unties the bandage on my leg. The mud is mostly cracked off because the yellow goo and blood has made it gross. The cut stinks.

Riktor smiles just a little bit and walks over to the hearth, then pours hot water from a black pot into a bowl. The cut burns when he starts washing it with a clean cloth and the hot water.

"You saw me doing that earlier with the mud, didn't you?" he asks me in his language. I nod my head up and down at him. He smiles again. "I saw you doing it during target practice."

Riktor frowns when he sees the inky black streaks. He looks up at me, and his face is serious. "How long has it been like this?" he asks.

I shrug my shoulders at him because I don't really know how many days and because I still have all of those buds underneath my tongue.

He looks at me for a long time. Then he holds his hand out near my chin.

"Spit it out," he orders.

I obey. I let all of the little buds fall out of my mouth and into his hand. He looks at them for a while.

"Gods," he finally says, real quiet. "You're a good little thief, aren't you?" he asks, looking at me. It's not much of a question.

I shrug my shoulders again because I'm actually kind of scared of him.

Riktor sets the buds into a little bowl to the side and points to my leg. "How long?" he asks again.

I chew on my bottom lip for a couple of seconds before I tell him, "A few days, I think. Forty two sessions."

He watches me carefully with his one eye, then frowns. "That's seven days," he tells me. He traces one of the inky black lines with his finger. "Do you know what this is?"

I shake my head side-to-side at him, and he says, "This means you have blood poisoning. It means your leg is very badly infected. You can die without medicine if you have this. Do you understand?"

I nod. "Yes."

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir." After a few minutes, I ask him, "Sir? Are you going to kill me now?"

He looks surprised. "Why would I do that?"

"That's what happened to the other boy that had black streaks by his cut."

Riktor frowns. He waits for a little bit, then shakes his head side-to-side. "His wound was much deeper and far more infected than yours, and had been for much longer. He also wasn't as strong as you are."

"So he was going to die anyways?"

"Yes, he was."

"Oh... but I'm not going to die?"

"We're hoping that you don't."

"Oh. That's good."

He nods at me to show that he heard what I said, then points to the little bowl full of buds. "Do you know what this is?"

"It's Witchwood, sir," I say.

"Did you steal this when nobody was looking?"

Heat covers my cheeks, and I bow my head in shame. "Yes, sir."

"We didn't even notice. Good job."

I blink up at him. I don't get it.

"All of us adults have been Hiretsuna pawns for a long time," he tells me, "And it's very difficult to steal things from us. You took those buds right from under our noses. It means you could be very good at thievery." He smiles then, just a little bit. "We just have to work on your lying. It's no good if you get caught stealing just because you can't come up with an excuse."

I nod again, understanding most of it. There are some words I don't get.

He hands me the bowl of buds. "Chew these up into a poultice and then pack them onto the wound. Try not to swallow."

There are enough Witchwood buds to cover my palm. I put them into my mouth and begin to chew. My nose crinkles up because they taste bad, but I keep chewing. Once they're mushy, I spit them out and pat them down onto the angry red cut. It hurts a lot, but it also feels kind of cold even though it was warm when I spat it out. Riktor hands me another bowl. It's full of mud.

I take it and use the mud to cover the Witchwood mush. Once it's dry, Riktor gives me a strip of clean white cloth. He shows me how to wrap the wound tightly without breaking apart the mud and Witchwood.

"That should help detoxify the wound and clear up the infection," he says when he's all done. Then he asks, "What's your name?"

I stop myself before I can tell him, because my name is from my language and I'm not allowed to talk in that.

"You can tell me," he says, quieter this time.

"It's Kurai," I say.

He nods at me. "I'm Riktor."

I nod back and tell him, "I know. I heard Mouseface call you that."

His lips turn into a big grin and he laughs as he picks me up and takes me down from the table. "Mouseface, huh? Ciela will be absolutely ecstatic to hear that one."

I don't get it. What's a see-luh? There are so many of his words I don't know.

Riktor takes me back to the room I share with the other three. When we get there, I look at him.

"Sir?" I ask as he unlocks the door part of the metal bars, "What's a... a Hiret... Hiretsuna pawn?"

He holds the door open for me and locks it after me, then watches all four of us children for a long time with his one eye.

"It's what you're becoming. It's what you're going to be when you're done with your training, gods willing," he answers. His voice gets quieter. "All of you better pray that you don't find yourselves in their favor."

Then he walks away.

I don't get it.

* * *

I visit the warm room with Riktor twice a day for twenty days, once after our run and once after our last session. For the first few days he cleans my wound and replaces the poultice and the mud and the bandage. After that I can do it myself while he watches to make sure I get it right.

After the twenty days my cut has stopped bleeding and dripping stinky yellow slime, and the inky black streaks have mostly gone away. It doesn't hurt as bad now. It's still red, but Riktor tells me that it will go away in time as the wound heals. He gives me a little roll of white bandages and a small bag full of Witchwood buds so that I don't have to come back. I keep them in the cell I share with the others, but I ask them not to touch it. They don't.

Sileny is sick again. When she coughs, her whole body rattles with it, like her bones are clinking together. It sounds like she has water in her chest. Kotori starts coughing the same way ten sessions later. Then it's me, then it's Ataeru.

It feels like there's cloth stuffed into my chest, and when I cough, it sounds wet. Sweat covers my skin. It pulls the warmth out of me and makes me shiver. Kotori and Ataeru have dark, dark circles under their eyes. When Sileny coughs, little bits of blood come up.

We all cough now. I hear it up and down the halls outside of our cell. I hear the adults talking in quiet voices. They curse sometimes.

The next day, they don't make us get up before sunrise to run. We all sleep.

Mouseface comes into our cell with wood. She makes a triangle with it near one of the walls in our room. She makes the triangle into a pyramid. Then, she makes signs with her hands. She blows on the wood, and it comes to life with fire.

I've seen my father do that before.

Mouseface leaves, and all four of us get as close to the fire as we can without being burned.

I can feel every part of my body except my fingers and toes and the tips of my ears when Mouseface gets back. They're warm, but I think the feeling in them is never going to come back. Mouseface makes us stand up, then she makes us push the far wall as hard as we can for as long as we can. She tells us to do it over and over.

I push the wall over and over and over. When I'm cold, I go to the fire. When I'm tired, I sleep. I change the bandage and poultice on my leg. It's not very red anymore, and the inky black streaks are almost all the way gone. I sleep again. Then I get up and push on the wall more. It never moves, but it makes my muscles less sore than when I'm just sitting and not doing anything. When I cough, my whole body shakes and hurts.

I push the wall and sleep and try to stay warm for a long, long time. I lose count of how many times Mouseface or Riktor or the bad man come in to put more wood on the fire.

Finally, finally, my coughs stop shaking my body. They stop being wet. The sweat dries on my skin and doesn't come back. Finally, I can breathe again.

The next morning, they take us running, but they tell us just to be easy and to walk if we have to. They've never let us walk before. After we're done, we cut our legs and line up and go back to our rooms. Sileny and I count the missing children. Seventeen of us have died. I do the math in my head.

Out of the hundred and fifty-two that started, eighty have died. There are seventy-two of us left.

I feel very, very small.

* * *

Several seasons come and go after the sickness passes, and more of us die. I mark down another tally for the little boy they carried out this morning. He makes ninety-one. I am one of sixty-one.

I feel smaller than I did before.

When I see the dead children carried out, I don't cry or scream anymore. My face is a blank stone, cold and unfeeling. I say prayers for their souls and prayers that Ataeru, Sileny, Kotori, and I don't join them.

We are strong now. We are fast. We are power and grace. We do not cry when we kill. We do not flinch when we are hit or cut or burned. We are becoming well-oiled machines that function quickly, follow all orders, and ask questions only when we're told to.

We are learning to steal from the world and from each other without being caught. We are learning to lie without being detected. We are learning to move unheard and unseen. We are learning to melt into shadows. We are becoming ghosts of this world; we are becoming silent, cold, and only half-present, walking somewhere between the living and the dead.

We are becoming predators designed to stalk, kill, and vanish before the prey realizes that it is dead.

We are learning the art of perfection.

The time for our running has doubled since the sickness passed. We train from two hours before dawn until three hours after dusk. The time for sleep is short.

The food that we are given has increased; we are now fed every fourth session, rather than every fifth. Ataeru believes that it's because there are fewer of us to feed now. I have to agree with him. My muscles have grown stronger with the food. I can train harder and longer now. We're also allowed to talk quietly while we eat now. Mouseface says it helps us get used to the language.

"Kurai," Sileny murmurs to me, "How long have we been here?" Her voice pulls me from my thoughts.

I shrug my shoulders and use my fingers to scoop hot brown bean mush and dirt into my mouth. I don't feel like talking to her, since she ran faster than I did this morning. I'll have to beat her tomorrow.

Ataeru rolls his eyes at us and mumbles something about girls before he gets to his feet and walks over to Riktor. He used to be afraid of the man, but now he's as comfortable with him as the rest of us are.

"Riktor, sir, how long have we been here?" he asks.

Riktor and Mouseface both look at him. Riktor looks thoughtful for a long time.

"Why do you ask, boy?" Riktor finally replies.

Ataeru jerks his thumb over his shoulder at us and tells him, "They wanted to know." What a rat.

"Kurai, Sileny. Come here," Mouseface calls.

I let out the sigh in my chest and follow Sileny to stand in front of her. Mouseface crosses her arms over her chest.

"Time is not something you should dwell on. You are here until we release you. The passing of seasons matters not. What matters is experience and rank. Do you understand?"

Sileny and I both nod our heads up and down at her. She dismisses us with a wave of her hand. I hear her scolding Riktor quietly as we walk away.

"You know what happens to snitches, Ataeru?" Sileny hisses at him.

When he turns to face her, he looks a little confused. "What?"

"They burn in hell for all of eternity."

Kotori arches an eyebrow at Sileny as we sit back down. She brings her hands in a circle around her, then she touches her left hand to her ear. She bunches her fingers around her and makes three invisible dots in the air, in a line going up and down. She wants to know where Sileny heard that.

"Mouseface told her that," Ataeru tells her. He doesn't seem to be bothered by what Sileny said.

A tiny smile comes to my lips. Every time they refer to the woman, they always call her Mouseface. It's funny because I'm the one who started calling her that, and now everybody in our class, in our sect, calls her that when she's not around. I just hope that she never finds out it's because of me.

"I'm serious," Sileny warns, "Snitches burn in hell for all of eternity. The gods don't look with favor on the cowardly."

"I wasn't snitching," Ataeru replies, calm as ever. "Riktor asked why I wanted to know, and I didn't know why you guys wanted to know in the first place."

I frown at him. "I didn't want to know, Ataeru. Sileny asked me, and I didn't know. There's a difference." It's getting easy for me to speak in their language, but I'm starting to forget my own. It's kind of strange, really.

Ataeru shrugs at me, which makes Sileny start to fidget her shoulders back and forth like she does when she gets mad.

"Still. We could've gotten in big trouble."

"Oh, bite me, Sileny."

"You know I will."

Ataeru glares at her and reaches up to hold his shoulder. The last time Sileny bit him there, it left a red and purple mark for days.

There is a resounding smack as Kotori hits both of them in the back of their heads, silencing them. I laugh because it's so effective. I guess that's why she does it so much.

We are back in our cell for an hour when Ataeru talks again.

"Kurai, how long have we been here?" he asks me.

I send a glare to him and cross my skinny arms under my chest. My ribs poke at me through my clothes. "Oh, no," I tell him, a bit of a pout coming into my voice. "We're not going through this again."

His lips pull down into a frown. "You're the only one who actually counts the sessions," he points out.

"He's right," Sileny agrees. Kotori nods.

I sigh a little bit through my cold nose and let my head lean back against the stone wall. I raise my hand and point to a little pile of black dust that was fire a few seasons ago. Kotori fetches a small stick of charred wood and hands it to me. I stand and use the walls to work through the problem. I use my right hand. I'm becoming used to using it for everything now.

We've been here for three thousand nine hundred and six sessions. 3906.

We have six sessions a day. 6.

I divide by six like my mother taught me. I'm surprised I still know how to do it.

We've been here for six hundred fifty-one days. 651.

There are seven days in a week, so that means we've been here for ninety-three weeks. 93.

There are fifty-two weeks in a year. 52.

I subtract. One year, forty-one weeks. 41.

I divide, then subtract again. One year, one half year, and fifteen weeks. 15.

Tired of the calculations, I drop the charcoal to the stone floor and sit down. I lean back against the cold wall next to Kotori.

"We've been here about a year and nine months," I say. My voice is stuck in my throat, so it comes out like a whisper. I look down at my hands. I can still see the black powder on my fingers through the darkness. All of the sudden I can't breathe because my throat is tight and my chest hurts and my stomach is trying to eat itself. I close my hands into fists and try not to think about what I'm thinking about.

"Do you think they miss us?"

Sileny's voice puts words to my thoughts. My chest squeezes hard in pain.

"You mean our families?" Ataeru answers her, but only after a few minutes. He shakes his head and crosses his arms over his chest. "I don't have a family."

Kotori is quiet in the darkness beside me, but the stiffness in her shoulder tells me that she doesn't feel well.

"Kurai?" Sileny asks quietly.

Even though they can't see me, I shrug my shoulders and hug my knees to my chest. I feel sick to my tummy as I reply, "I don't know."

Ataeru laughs at me, and blood rushes to my face. I tell him to shut up, but he doesn't. He keeps laughing, so I reach over and hit him in the face.

He gets quiet.

"That wasn't funny, Ataeru," Sileny says quietly in the dark. "What happened to them?"

"I don't know," I say. The air puffs out of me in one breath. My heart hurts.

"How do you not know?" Sileny asks. I see her head tilt in the dark.

I lift my shoulders up-and-down in a shrug and whisper, "I just don't know."

I want to cry, but I don't let myself. We aren't supposed to cry.


	3. Weakness

****Here's chapter three. Please note that this has replaced the old chapters 4 and 5, so if you've already read those, the content is the same in this chapter.****

 ** **Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.****

 ** **Disclaimer: Content is rated for mature adult (MA) audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.****

 ** **As always, feedback is appreciated. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Feel free to contact me.****

 ** **-Nyroc****

* * *

 _ _We go on for thirty minutes, forty minutes, an hour. Two hours. Three hours. We fight to the point of exhaustion.__

 _ _We stop abruptly when he hits me hard in the face. I'm too tired to block it, so I drop to the ground like a sack of rocks. I land on my belly and cough blood onto the stonework. My whole body is shaking. There's too much cold, too much fighting, too much starvation, too much exhaustion. We haven't eaten in days. Weeks, maybe. I have no energy. I feel like I can't go on.__

 _ _Still, I push myself to my feet anyway and turn to look at him. We both take a few moments to breathe. I can see the things he wants to say in the green of his eyes and his words from days or months or years before echo in my mind. I think he meant them at the time, but he's stronger than I am now. He has a better chance. We both know how this is going to end. My knees shake and threaten to send me tumbling down to the stonework again, but I don't let them.__

 _ _There is no weakness in Hiretsuna.__

* * *

I don't have time in the next few months to worry about my family. I don't have time to think about them. I don't have time to fear for them. I don't have time to dream about them. I don't even have time to sleep. After a while the days blend together, one after another without much to break up the monotony. It's easy to sink into a routine—practice after practice, training session after training session, flogging after flogging, cut after cut. The scars build up on our bodies like the layers of ice build up on the ground.

Physical training is only part of what we do now. Now, we train our minds as well. I bury myself in the words they say, the things they teach us. I learn to read the runes they write. I learn to mimic the symbols. I learn to take things apart and put them back together. I take apart locks, I do and undo knots, I learn everything I need to know to never be contained. We torture each other over and over and I learn everything I need to know to never crack. We make shogi pieces out of scraps of wood and shale and play through the night in our cells to get better at strategy.

I'm fluent in the language now. I guess over two years of speaking only it means I really had to learn it, and I don't have any trouble now. I speak and think and dream in only Runic. I remember being really upset the first time I didn't dream in my native tongue, but I guess it's fine. It has to be fine. I don't really have another choice. I dream in Runic at night and I speak it during the day. I swear a lot, too. I picked that up from some of the other kids. Mostly from Ataeru.

"Goddamnit Kurai, get on your feet!"

Speak of the devil.

His voice pulls me out of the dreary grey fog that fills my head. I groan a little and push myself up with my hands. I'm vaguely aware that my wrist is sprained. The muscles are bruised from landing in an odd direction underneath my body. I don't pay it any attention, though; pain is something that our minds construct, and if I ignore it, it will stop existing. I have to fight through it.

I force myself to my feet and stagger a little. The movement stirs up the snow I've been laying on and mixes the red of splattered blood with the pure white, making it dirty. Everything we touch becomes dirty. I reach up and run the back of my hand across my mouth to wipe away the blood. My mouth is filled with it and the copper taste makes me feel sick.

The girl I'm fighting comes at me again. She outweighs me by probably 15 kilos, since she's older than me. Her name is Balith, and she's awful. She screeches like a banshee as she attacks me head-on, aiming to punch me in the face a second or third or fourth time—I have honestly lost track at this point.

I spit the blood and two teeth from my mouth directly into her face. It catches her off-guard and gives me enough time to grab the back of her head. I pull it forward and smash her face down onto my knee with enough force to break her nose. She howls in pain as the bones crunch against my leg. I want to back off, to let her compose herself, but I know that I can't.

There is no mercy in Hiretsuna.

I shove her back down into the snow and drop myself onto her skinny little torso. She claws blindly at my face and I pin her arms to the ground, then grind my knees down into her wrists so she can't hit me back. I pull my hand back and curl my fingers into a fist.

I pound her in the face probably 16 times before she passes out. And even then, I keep hitting her.

It isn't until Mouseface calls me off that I stop. I stand up and back off, my spine straightening into a rigid line as I stand at attention. She goes to inspect my work. Balith is a bloody mess of broken bones and bruises. Blood bubbles up at her lips with every breath she takes.

Honestly, I'm a little worried she might die.

But not too worried, because she's just a worthless as I am.

Mouseface looks over at me and backs up a little bit. "Mark her and take her back to her cell," she orders.

I nod and walk back over to Balith. Ataeru tosses me one of his knives, and I catch it and slit open one of Balith's ankles. It isn't deep enough to cause any real damage, but it'll scar over. I toss the knife back and scoop Balith up, carrying her over my shoulders and holding on to one arm and one leg.

The walk back through the snow to the barracks is long and tiresome. Balith is heavy and she drips blood on me as we go, which makes the skin slick where I'm trying to hold onto her. Eventually we get back to the stone buildings and I sit her down in her cell, up against the wall. I check to make sure she isn't going to suffocate. She's regained a little bit of consciousness.

"You hit hard, little shadow," she whispers to me. She shifts a little and leans her head forward to let the blood drip out of her mouth. It adds to the staining on her shift, but honestly, all of our clothes now are more red than anything. Her face is starting to swell up. "Why didn't you just kill me?"

I shake my head at her. "Because then I'd have to dig the hole to drop you in," I say. The permafrost makes digging fairly impossible. But, really, that's not the reason, and both of us know it.

"You're still too soft," she says.

"I can still pound you into the ground," I say. She scoffs a little bit. We're not supposed to laugh, and she knows that, so as punishment I reach up and grab her broken nose. She gasps sharply—a sign of pain, which is also unacceptable.

"Get off me, you little bitch!" she snaps.

I yank on her nose. There's a satisfying crunching noise as the bones snap back into place. She smacks me across the face and reaches up to hold her nose as blood pours out of it.

"Gods damn you," she hisses at me.

"That's for my teeth," I say. I walk to the entrance of her cell and scoop up a few handfuls of snow. I hold it out to her. "Ice your face before you stop breathing."

"Fuck off," she mutters, but she takes the snow anyway and presses it gingerly to her swollen face. It'll probably be disfigured once it heals. "You're too soft, little shadow," she says to me, "And the next time we fight, I'm going to kill you for this."

"You say that every time," I say as I stand up. I'm not particularly worried or scared of her. Being scared is a luxury I don't have.

I leave her there, bleeding and miserable, and walk back to the training area. I scoop up some snow on the way, chewing on some to stop the bleeding in my mouth and holding some on the hand I'm fairly certain I broke on Balith's face. My knuckles are black and cut open. They hurt, of course, but I force myself not to think about it. There is no pain that I can't control with my mind. If I don't let it consume me, it doesn't exist.

Ataeru is fighting a boy named Riku when I get back. Riku is bigger and stronger than Tae, and it doesn't take him too long before he has Tae pinned on the ground. Tae fights hard, of course, but it doesn't really matter. Riku hits him until he passes out, and then stops.

Mouseface smacks him across the back with a thin stick and he resumes punching Tae until Mouseface finally calls him off.

Riku is like me. He's still too soft. He doesn't have the desire to hurt another human being.

Then again, we aren't human beings. Not really. Not to them.

I stand still with the others in our class as Riku hauls Tae off to the side. He's already waking up a little, so there's no need to take him all the way back to the barracks. I crouch next to him and put his nose and jaw back into place so they won't heal the wrong way and cause problems later. I'm pretty much the designated nose-fixer, which is fine.

"You," Mouseface calls. I look over at her and realize that she's talking to me. She never calls us by our names anymore—not that she ever really has. She says it makes us feel too human.

I straighten up and walk over to her, standing at attention. She points to Riku. "Fight with him."

I nod a little and turn to face Riku. We wait until Mouseface tells us to begin before we launch ourselves at each other. There is no waiting to see who will strike first, because there is no hesitation in Hiretsuna.

* * *

"It'll probably be a while before the bleeding stops."

I nod a little bit and tip my head forward. Sileny places a handful of snow on the back of my neck. I close my eyes as I wait for my nose to stop dripping red. I don't think it's broken since I didn't feel the bones break, but it still hurts and is already swollen. Riku hits hard.

"Didn't break you, did I, little shadow?"

I look to the side. Riku is standing in the entrance to our cell. The door doesn't really close anymore, since it's rusted open. It's fine, though—we don't really have anywhere we can go.

"You hit like a southerner," I say. From what I've gathered, it's pretty offensive to anyone who comes from the north. I've never understood it, since I'm a southerner and I hit pretty hard, but whatever.

He frowns at me, but he doesn't say anything offensive back. Instead, he just crosses his arms and leans against the iron door of the cell.

"Balith is going to kill you," he informs me. He glances over to the side, down the alley formed by the barracks. "Tonight."

I just hum at him because I honestly couldn't care less. "She can try," I say.

He looks back down at me and his brows wrinkle in the middle. "No, she's actually going to kill you."

"I'm not afraid of death." I wipe some extra blood from my nose. "It'll probably be better than whatever the hell they have planned for us next in this hell hole."

Riku frowns a little deeper at me, but he just shakes his head. "Stupid southerner," he mutters. "I guess we'll see if you're still around come morning." He pushes off the iron bars and walks away.

"Do you really think she'll try to kill you?" Sileny asks a few minutes later.

I lift my shoulders in a shrug. "She can try," I say again. In all honesty, it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I wake suddenly from sleep. It's the dead of night, but I'm still leaning against the wall. Sileny, Kotori, and Ataeru are all in the opposite corner, sleeping in a pile to keep from freezing to death. They probably tried to sleep around me, but judging by the smears of blood on the ground, I must have kicked them away. The air is so cold that it hurts my skin and small crystals of ice have built up anywhere that moisture collects. The blood is frozen to my face. My nostrils, the corners of my mouth, the thick lashes around my eyes—all of them have flecks of ice on them.

It's the ice that gives her away.

It crunches under her bare feet, even though she tries to be quiet. It's not like her to be quiet. Normally she gives off a banshee-like scream before she attacks, but not this time. Still, I hear her coming.

I turn slightly and bring my knife up from my side as she jumps at me, her mouth open in a snarl, and my blade nestles itself across her gaping mouth. The forward energy of her movement doesn't stop and she lands on me hard. Her knife buries itself deep in my side and my knife cuts several centimeters into the corner of her mouth at each side. It surprises her that I'm awake.

She should really know better by now.

She twists her knife deeper into my side and I pull my hand back, then slam the hilt of my knife into the side of her jaw. Her face is still bruised and swollen from where I beat the hell out of it earlier. She rolls back from me, jarred by the impact, and I grab hold of the hand that's holding onto the knife in my side. I twist hard to the side and bend her wrist up so quickly and with so much force that I can actually feel the crack as the bones in her arm break in one, two, three, four, five places. Shards of white erupt through her skin.

She screams in pain.

Which is, of course, a mistake.

There's a reason Hiretsuna worms don't react to pain.

The cuts in the sides of her mouth give as her jaw gapes wide and I watch through the dark as her flesh tears. It rips upward on each side of her face like a sick, wicked grin carved by the gatekeeper of the underworld. Blood pours from the wounds and drips down onto the stone, where it begins to freeze almost immediately.

She thrashes around in crimson slush and shrieks in horror, cursing me over and over. I don't know which set of gods she prays to, but if they're powerful, I'm not going to have a happy afterlife.

It only takes a few minutes for Mouseface, Riktor, and Iggnok the Horrid to arrive. Mouseface hauls off the screaming Balith and Riktor takes me to the warm room while Iggnok stays behind to clean up the mess.

It takes some effort for Riktor to get Balith's knife out of my side. The blade was frigid cold going in, so it froze to my skin and flesh. I barely even felt it once it stopped moving. It was like it was a hot iron, cauterizing the wound as it entered. I never realized cold could do the same thing.

When the knife comes out, the bleeding starts up again, and it only takes a minute for me to get dizzy. The walls and floor pitch around and I feel like I'm on a slaving ship in the middle of a storm. Unable to help it, I turn and vomit over the side of the table. Bile and water are the only things that splatter on the floor because I haven't eaten in far too long. Riktor makes me lean back and lay down and seconds later, the room blurs, and then goes dark.

* * *

It takes two weeks for the wound in my side to heal enough for me to go back to normal training. In the meantime, I do exercises that won't make me bleed out, and I work on other things.

They start teaching us ninjutsu.

I have a bit of experience kneading chakra, since my big brother used to try to teach me fire jutsu. But I never got the hang of it, and my parents never wanted me to become a ninja. Hell, _I_ never wanted me to become a ninja. But my brother loved the village and wanted to protect it no matter what, and so I wanted to be able to protect it no matter what. He didn't force it on me, which is probably why I wanted to learn.

Not that any of that really matters now. I don't really have a choice.

I know a fire jutsu, but as it turns out, the litmus paper they gave me crinkled up, which means that my chakra is electric in nature. They hand me over to Mouseface. Sileny comes, too, and she teaches us how to mold lightning. It's hard work, but it doesn't take too long to get the hang of it. All we ever do is train physically and mentally, so we have massive amounts of chakra to work with. We can train for hours before we actually get tired.

Once my body heals, things go back to normal. Physical training, then mental, then chakra, then physical again. They start feeding us more often to keep up with the high energy demands. Two small meals a day are enough to keep us going. Our bodies burn through the protein and build up muscles, but never fat. There are never any extra calories that we don't use. I build muscle, but I haven't grown any taller since I got here—I'll probably be small forever, if I don't die before I get out of here.

They teach us all of the basics—clones, substitutions, illusions, escapes, diversions, shurikenjutsu. All of it. Then we move on to change in form, and then change in nature, and then both.

Turns out, I can't do both.

I can hold electricity in my palm but never shoot it outward. I can move chakra away from my body but never electrify it. I try and try and try, but I can't get it. Mouseface whips me across the back of the legs with a switch every time I get it wrong but that doesn't make it manifest any quicker. Even after my legs are red and my skin is raw and my body is drained, I still can't do it.

At least I'm not the only one.

She doesn't dismiss us until it's well past dark outside. The moon is full and the sky is clear so the bright light reflects on the snow. I walk back to my cell with Sileny next to me, the others around us completely silent. We don't really talk to each other anymore. After enough of our friends died and enough of our hearts got broken, we learned to just stop making friends. Sileny, Tae, and Kotori are the exceptions, since I bunk with them. I wish I could distance myself from them to save myself the heartache. Friendship with them is an involuntary reflex that I wish I could stifle but I can't.

I'm pulled from my thoughts when Sileny stops walking. I turn to look back at her, to ask her why she had stopped, but she isn't looking at me. She's looking out at the snow. I follow her gaze and locate a white winter hare cleverly disguised in the blanket of pure white that surrounds it. There was once a time when I would have jumped for joy at the thought of seeing another living creature, but I don't anymore. Rabbits are just a stepping stone in the hierarchy of things we kill in order to dissolve our feelings and our morality.

She pulls her smaller throwing knife off of her belt and stays still for several minutes. The hare eventually goes back to munching on a small patch of greyish winter grass. Once it relaxes its guard, she strikes. The knife flies through the air and misses by a centimeter. The hare darts to the right and, quick as a whip, I sling my throwing knife a meter in front of it. It hits the hare in the back leg. The animal screeches and flails around on the ground, turning the snow into a bloody mess. I walk over to it and break its neck without a second thought, then clean my knife on its fur and put it away. I hold the rabbit by the ears and offer it to Sileny. She shakes her head as she stoops to pick up her knife.

"You keep what you kill," she says.

From my experience, that's never been the case, since Mouseface and the other seniors always confiscate our kills after we hunt them down. But then again, they supply those targets; this one was out in the open and ours for the taking. I follow her back to the barracks, dripping rabbit blood on the way, and settle down once we reach our cell.

Kotori isn't back yet, which makes sense, since wind nature is the hardest to master. But Ataeru is there, playing shogi by himself with the pieces we made from shale rocks. He looks up at us when we enter and I see his brow quirk up in the dark.

"Got yourself a little snack?" he asks.

I nod a little and settle down in one of the corners near the entrance of the cell, since I don't want gore in the other parts to attract vermin of any kind. Nothing grows here, but scavengers are ruthless, and the last thing we want are rock rats. They're large and savage, with thick hides and sharp teeth. That's how a kid down in the next cell block died—the rock rats could smell one of his open wounds after it putrefied, so they ate the meat off his bones in the night. He was the only one in that cell, so nobody found him for four days, after they'd eaten him from the inside out.

The image of his eaten body sticks in my mind as I skin the rabbit, but for some reason it doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. I roll up the skin with the inside out and pull snow in from the outside to bury it to keep it from rotting. We don't have any way to tan the hide, but the Runic gods prohibit wastefulness in a kill, and just in case they're real I don't want to piss them off. Next I gut the rabbit and slice open its insides to check for belly worms. They aren't usually a problem up north since it's too cold for them to survive. Then I cut off the head and stand up. I give the guts and the head to Tae, since they're his favorite, and cut the rabbit in half at the bottom of its ribs. I divide its rump lengthwise down its spine and give Sileny one of the back legs and the stuff attached to it. I keep the other, and store the front legs and ribs in the snow for Kotori when she gets back.

We should probably cook the meat, but we don't really have a way to do it, and we're all starving anyway. It's slimy and gamy when it's raw. The bites crawl down my throat. The blood squishes from the muscle as I chew it between my teeth. I scrape the meat from the bones with my knife. Sileny doesn't bother—she just rips pieces of meat off with her teeth like an animal.

I guess eating raw meat makes us all animals, in a way. It's hardly a sign of civilization, that's for sure.

I collect the bones once everyone is done and stack them in a small pile by the front of the cell. The dry bones themselves probably won't attract the rock rats, but if they do, I don't want them anywhere near us. With our bellies tighter than usual and squirming a little from the feel ofraw game, we curl up together and try to sleep.

* * *

Crystals of ice have formed anywhere moisture collects on my body. My nostrils, my eyelashes, the corners of my mouth. My breath spirals up in a small white plume before it is whisked away by the harsh wind. It howls through the mountains, carrying a mixture of snow and hailstones as it goes.

I crouch down a little lower in the snow, my eyes still fixed on the moving shadow in front of me. The monochromatic landscape is all grey at this time of morning. It's hard to discern light from shadow, black from white, because everything is the same shade like smoke and ash. But still, I can see it moving, lanky and lean, slinking through the landscape toward me. I'm downwind of it. Its amber eyes glow through the flurries of snow, scanning back and forth.

I have to make this kill.

When it's close enough, so close that I could hit it with a stone's throw, I spring forward. The mountain cat yowls in surprise, its amber eyes wide, and its lips curl up into a snarl. It reaches out and grabs me with its sharp claws as I plunge my knife deep in its belly. Its blood stains the white snow as we roll around, ripping open the skin of my arms. It tries to bite down on my neck, and when I turn away at the last second, it sinks its teeth into the cartilage of my ear instead. It rips open.

It doesn't hurt. Pain does not exist except inside my own mind.

I wrestle with the cat for several minutes before I'm able to bury my blade in its jugular vein. It very slowly stops its struggle as the life drains from it. When it can't use it's claws anymore, I press my lips to the hole in its neck and drink deep while the blood is still hot. When I can't drink any more, I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, clean off my blade, and sling the cat over my back. It outweighs me by several kilos, but I can't let that stop me. I feel the heat slowly draining from its body as I walk it back down the mountain side.

Later, after my technique has been scored and the meat has been eaten, I roll the fresh new pelt up around what's left of the skeleton and bring it back with me to the barracks. Hiretsuna doesn't usually follow the law, but even here, you keep what you kill.

Ataeru is back in the cell when I get there. He's been quiet lately. His bones have been hurting as his body tries to grow, but can't find the nutrients to actually build anything. Three and a half years of malnutrition will do that, I guess. I don't think I've grown any more than maybe ten centimeters since I got here. I'll probably be small forever.

"What'd you get?" he asks curiously.

"Frostbite," I say. He scoffs at me, and I look over at him. "Mountain cat," I supply.

"That'll be a warm pelt," he comments, his head nodding slowly as he thinks aloud.

"If I can actually get it to tan properly this time," I mutter. I stack the bones in a pile near the door and bury the cat's skull in the snow to keep it fresh. Then I hang the pelt meat-side-out on the wall. The metal nails I pounded into the mortar are still holding fast. I'm not technically supposed to have them, but Mouseface left them out in the training yard, and here, it's finders-keepers. I pull out my knife and begin carefully scraping the fat and membrane from the skin.

"You're pretty handy for a southerner," Ataeru comments.

I shrug. "I'm hardly a southerner anymore," I point out.

He hums at me and gets up to help me with the pelt. He takes the side I'm not working on and continues to scrape. Suddenly he chuckles.

"What?" I ask, even though I don't take my eyes off the hide.

"I just forgot you were left-handed, that's all," he says.

I blink, realizing that I'm using my left hand for scraping. I haven't used it in a while since the superstition up here is that left-handed people are witches or cursed or possessed or some other nonsense. But I shrug and continue to use it anyway. Our arms keep knocking into each other as we work, but I ignore it for the most part. He ignores it, too, until I accidentally jab my elbow into his funny bone. He jerks his arm back and scowls at me.

"Sorry," I say, even though we're not really supposed to apologize. He continues to scowl at me, so I lift his elbow and kiss it better. I watch him for a moment before he bursts out laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. Eventually he sits back down against the wall, his bones too sore to stay on his feet for longer than he needs to. We stay quiet for a while, with no sound except the scraping of my knife against the hide and the whistling of the wind outside.

* * *

In the following weeks since I killed and skinned the mountain cat, I've been able to tan the hide with the cat's brain and smoke it over a fire of dried dung. The hides of a second cat and two caribou follow it on the wall. The pelts make sleeping far more comfortable as the temperature outside begins to plummet again.

"Kurai, what the devil are you doing?" Sileny asks unhappily. I'm melting fat inside a bowl I made out of the second mountain cat's skull.

"I can't sleep," I say, which is obvious. It's light outside. Not that that's much of a help, because at this time of year, it's never really dark out. The sun stays low behind the mountains and makes midnight look like dusk.

"So, naturally, you're rendering," Sileny says slowly. Clearly she means that there's nothing natural about it, but I don't exactly owe her any kind of explanation. Eventually she gives up and rolls back over, the shadows of her movement playing on the wall by the light of the smoldering coals.

Once the fat is melted, I drip it onto the hinges of the freezing metal door of our cell. It hasn't actually been closed in years, since it's been frozen open. But since I couldn't sleep, I dug it out of the snow. The hinges squeal and groan noisily as I pull the door, but eventually the fat lubricates the hinges enough to allow the door to close. I move it back and forth several times for good measure.

"Kurai, quiet the hell down," Sileny barks at me.

"Piss off."

I know I won't be sleeping tonight anyway, so I open the door again and begin packing snow in between all of the iron bars on the door, using the animal bones I've collected for additional support where it's needed. It takes a few hours, but eventually I've blocked out most of the open spaces in the bars. It matches the two patches along the walls, the barred spots that hold the door.

My mind wanders as I work. I don't know why, but I can't stop thinking about my brother. I know we're not supposed to, but I can't help it. I can't stop worrying.

" _Relax your wrist, and throw it like this," he says, throwing the shuriken and letting his wrist go loose with the follow-through. It hits the target dead in the center._

 _I try to do the same thing, but I'm not strong enough. My shuriken glances off the edge of the target and falls to the ground. I pout a little._

" _Hey, you'll get it eventually, Kurai. Just keep practicing," he chuckles. I feel him pat my head, ruffling my hair and messing up the braids Mama put it in. I frown at him a little, but I keep practicing anyway._

The cold eventually gets to me and I have to stop. I pull the door shut, and thankfully, the snow doesn't immediately crumble. My project of several weeks is progressing nicely. The wind continues to whistle outside, but the packed snow blocks most of it. With that and the smoldering fire still burning in the rear of our cell, the room becomes at least ten degrees warmer within a few minutes. I move over to the remains of the fire and defrost my hands. Then I curl up under the pelts with the others.

"Kurai, your feet are freezing," Ataeru hisses at me.

"Well, your legs are warm," I mutter. He shifts away from me anyway, but eventually Kotori crawls over him and me and snuggles up against my back. She's warmer than he is, and I shiver into her arms.

" _Big Brother, I'm tired," I say. No amount of practicing has gotten my shuriken any closer to the middle of the target. I look over at him. He's practicing his jutsu, his body flickering in and out of sight as he moves. But he stops when I talk to him and smiles at me._

" _Okay, Kurai. Let's get you home," he says. He scoops me up and sets me up on his shoulders as he walks us home. I've never been so tall in my life. I wrap my arms around his forehead and set my chin on top of his head, his curly hair tickling my nose._

The images of him follow my mind into a restless sleep, and I dream about him, and then I dream about me. Some of the images are terrifying. A dark place, surrounded by people trying to take things from me. I don't know what it is they want. A dark night, Little Big Brother, and then I can't see anymore. A long fall, and then water. It fills my lungs.

I wake with a start to find Kotori leaning over me, shaking me to wake me up. It takes a minute for me to remember where I am. I pull myself up into a sitting position and rub my head.

"Kurai, get up," Ataeru barks at me. Kotori helps pull me to my feet. My head is throbbing, and I'm not sure why. "Come on. We've got training."

"Yeah." I shake my head rapidly to try to get the fog to clear out of it, but I can't shake away the feeling of disconnect within my body. It's like I'm functioning from some place far away, telling my body to move around without really having any actual concrete grasp on what it's actually doing. It's incredibly disorienting.

I follow them out into the dark, since it's still very, very early. Sileny brings up the rear, but eventually she passes me. I trail behind them slowly, my mind still occupied by the disturbing images in my dreams. I don't stop until I physically bump into Sileny's back, and I blink slowly as she glowers back at me.

"Get your head out of your ass, Kurai," she hisses at me, and turns forward again.

I move slowly as I come to stand beside her. I rub at my eye reflexively. It only happens for a moment before a line of fire cuts down the back of my hand. I jump a little bit, startled, and my wide eyes shoot up. Mouseface has a thin switch in her hand. I drop my hand down to my side and steel myself.

I can't believe I was stupid enough to show a shred of human nature. Hiretsuna worms don't get tired. They don't get sleepy. They don't have traits like that.

Mouseface moves on and all of us step into a single straight line, shoulder to shoulder, as she passes us.

"From this day, you are rats."

Oh.

It makes sense that every rank we go through is a different kind of pest, a different kind of undesirable. Worms, to fleas, to lice, to rats. I wonder what comes next. Everything is meant to remind us that we have no value, that we are not human. It's effective, really.

"Rats are special," Mouseface continues. She taps Balith—the one with the grin of scars on her cheeks that always shrieks when she's fighting—on the head with her switch. "What do we do with rats?"

Balith hesitates, which earns her a smack on the shoulder. She winces, which earns her a second one. She doesn't flinch this time, but still, Balith is a slow learner.

"We eat them," she replies.

A third switch, a flinch, and then a fourth. Mouseface moves on.

She taps the boy Riku on the head. "You. What do we do with rats?"

"We... test things on them?" he asks. She smacks him in the shoulder and, in a stronger voice, he says, "We test things on them."

Mouseface nods. "Yes," she says. A confirmation, but never praise. They don't praise us in Hiretsuna.

"From this day, you are rats," she says. "You will be assigned a color, and from that color you will be assigned your tests."

I frown in confusion, but I don't say anything. I'm already a hunter. Is there something else they're splitting us into?

We all keep still, standing there in the cold, some of us shivering. I am some of us, because I'm smaller than most. My body struggles to keep itself warm. Mouseface and another teacher walk down the line, dotting the front of our smocks with colors. Sileny gets red. Kotori gets white. Ataeru and I get black.

"Scatter!" Mouseface yells, and we do. There are pillars of smoke in the distance, smoldering and rising like moving towers. Ataeru and I and a bunch of others race toward the black one, because it's never a good idea to keep someone waiting when they could kill us without any effort.

We run for probably five or seven kilometers before we come to an old building. It's low to the ground, half-buried in snow, and most of it looks like it might be falling apart. But we enter it anyway.

Iggnok the Horrid and Riktor are waiting for us. By the smirk on Iggnok's face, I don't think we're going to like what happens next.

We follow them through the building and I find that I'm right. There are at least twenty different tilting tables in the long room we step into, all of them with straps to hold us down. An uneasy feeling settles heavily in my stomach. I don't want to be strapped down—nobody does, really—but it's not like we have any choice. I strip like I'm ordered to and go to a table next to Ataeru so that I can see him, hop up, and lay down. Riktor buckles me in tight. There isn't any part of my body that I can move except for my head, and after a moment, that gets buckled in, too.

I sit in the quiet for a while, hearing different numbers of us rats screaming in what I'm assuming is agony to my left as they work down the line. One by one they scream, a shrieking noise that I know I'll never be able to wash from my brain.

My heart starts to hammer in my ears as panic begins to build. We aren't supposed to feel panic, but I can't help it.

Ataeru is the next one they target. They hook up bags of liquid to bundles of dozens of needles, all spaced far enough apart to enter the skin, and rigged so that the syringes depress at the same time in some scary hydraulic setup. The liquid is dark amber. Riktor says something to Ataeru, but I can't hear what it is. He slips a thick piece of leather between Ataeru's teeth for him to bite down on.

I can't hear anything but the rushing in my ears.

They push the numerous needles into Ataeru's deltoid muscle and pull a trigger on the handle, and the syringes depress a small amount. Ataeru's body stiffens, but he doesn't cry out. They move to his bicep and his tricep, down his arm, across his chest, hitting every major muscle group. His body is stiff as an icicle. I can't see a while lot in my peripheral vision, but I can see the girl across from me, white as a sheet as she stares at the scene unfolding before her.

I watch in my peripherals as my best friend begins thrashing around.

The rushing in my ears dulls as Ataeru cries out in agony, and before long he's screaming. They depress the liquid into every single muscle group in his body. I can see him jerking around against his bonds, trying to get loose. Eventually his body grows still, more or less, as he loses consciousness.

My heart is hammering so hard in my chest I think my ribcage will break as they pick up their things and move over to me.

I fight Riktor for a minute as he tightens the straps, but there isn't anything I can do. Eventually I open my mouth and bite down onto the leather strap he sticks into my mouth.

"It's okay this time if you cry out," he says to me. I wonder if it's what he says to everyone.

I shake and shiver as I try to keep my breathing even, wincing as they push the needles into my skin, the same needles they used on Ataeru. It burns. They click the trigger, depressing the syringes, and it begins to sear. It feels like my muscles are eating themselves, dissolving into mush, melting over a burning hot flame. I don't even last until the second injection before I'm screaming. Everything burns so bad.

Despite the duration of my screaming, I stay conscious for a lot longer than Ataeru did. My heart is hammering so hard and fast I think it might explode. There are a few times that Riktor checks my pulse to make sure I'm not about to die, and they stop halfway through to change the set of needles because they're getting too dull. I sit there while I wait, writhing in agony. My face is burning from the saltwater. They resume their poking and prodding and my muscles keep screaming at me. They move from my arms to my chest to my abdomen to my legs. They get to the lower parts of my thighs before everything starts feeling fuzzy, my eyes roll back in my head, and my body shakes uncontrollably. I can't see anything. I can't hear anything clearly, just muffled voices.

I can barely make it out when Riktor says I'm having a seizure. Iggnok tells him to fuck off—I can tell by the inflection in his voice—and keeps stabbing me with needles anyway. It takes a while for my body to stop shaking, and when it does, everything feels like it's in a fog. I'm in a fog. Everything hurts.

Eventually they finish up, and Riktor pulls the leather strap from my mouth. I'm still crying, still sobbing, still burning. I look up at him and his whole body is cloaked in a rushing fog of blue. He frowns and unbuckles my head, turning my face to look into my eyes. I blink blearily at him, very sure that I'm imagining the colors surrounding him and Iggnok. Everything is dim and my eyes are tired and puffy. I barely make out Riktor and Iggnok exchanging a glance before everything goes dark and I am no longer in pain.

* * *

I sleep for at least a day, maybe two. Maybe three. Hell, maybe I sleep for a whole year. I can't tell.

I have strange dreams. In these dreams, I am carried away from that long, broken-down building and brought to the warm room. The infirmary, I recall. My wounds are treated with the most basic of care and I'm put into a second long room, this one warm as well, and I lay on the floor for a long time, unable to move. Riktor, Mouseface, and Iggnok poke and prod at me at random intervals. Eventually, strangers come to poke and prod at me, too.

When I finally wake, my head feels like it is filled with stones. It takes me a long time to sit up, and when I do, I find Riktor crouching patiently in front of me. He hands me a cup of water, and I drink it eagerly. Too fast, it turns out, but he is prepared for that. I vomit into the bucket he holds out. He offers me a second cup of water, and I drink it far more slowly this time.

"How do you feel?" he asks, which is odd, because normally they don't care.

It takes me forever to be able to speak, and when I do, my voice is still hoarse from all of the screaming I did. "Not... great," I croak, which is the understatement of the century.

Riktor nods knowingly, and I wonder if he experienced the same thing when he was younger.

"It will be a while before your body heals. You'll have another day off training, but then you have to rebuild your muscles."

I nod, and I cringe as he pulls me to my feet. I immediately collapse like a blade of spring grass in a winter wind and he catches me before I can fall. He scoops me up and carries me back to the barracks. My wind block is still up, and there's a wood fire burning inside. He sets me down against the back wall where it's warmest and I lean against it and close my eyes.

"Kurai," he says, and I open my eyes again. "You're from the south. What's your family name?"

I open my mouth, but the words die on my lips. It takes a while before I shake my head.

"I don't remember," I say, and I'm being honest. I can vaguely picture our clan symbol, but I can't remember the words that go with it. I haven't spoken the southern tongue in years.

"Okay," he relents, and he stands up. "Don't die." He leaves me there.

I move onto my belly and crawl toward the fire, curling up naked in front of it so I can be warmer and closing my eyes against the flickering light. My body is still aching, my head pounding, as I try to sleep again.

I don't know how long I'm out before I hear a commotion and it stirs me from sleep. I blink my tired eyes open and roll over. Ataeru is back, sleeping in one corner. Kotori and Sileny are back, too. Sileny is leaning against the back wall, the fire glinting enough to light up her sunken eyes and cheeks. She looks like death. Kotori is hovering over her, trying to tend to her in some way or another. I force myself to roll over and crawl over to them on my hands and knees.

The sight before me makes my blood run cold.

Sileny has a bruise on her elbow, spreading black marks through her veins like blood poisoning. She's sitting in a puddle of her own blood. It's leaking from between her legs, heavy enough that I think she might be hemorrhaging internally. It's too heavy to be the monthly thing my brother's female friends used to complain about. It's bright red. Too bright.

I force myself to get up and force myself to get on my feet. Everything hurts. My world pitches around and I fall back down, skinning my knee open on the stone floor. But I force myself to crawl to the door, to haul it open, to wander through the snow on hands and feet until I get to the infirmary. I grasp the door frame and haul myself up.

Riktor is there, putting stitches in the face of a boy with dark blonde hair. The cut stretches from his temple to his jaw in front of his right ear. Riktor looks over at me and frowns.

"It's Sileny," I pant, "Sileny's... she's gonna' bleed out."

His eyes widen a little and he stands up.

"Stay, Den," he orders, and the boy nods.

Riktor picks me up and carries me back to the barracks because I'm too slow. He sets me down by the fire when he gets there and crouches over Sileny. She's still bleeding out.

"Okay, here we go," he murmurs, and picks her up. He carries her out, leaving us there alone with the sleeping Ataeru and the puddle of blood.

I have the very distinct feeling in my stomach that I'm not going to see her again.

Kotori and I don't say anything, we just curl up by the fire. Her body is bruised, and when I look over at her, I see that she has tiny spots by her temples like she's been injected with something. The veins around her forehead are raised like she's getting a headache, which she probably is. She has track marks on her elbows, too.

"I want to go home," I say quietly, admitting it out loud for the first time.

Kotori nods and signs, _'Me, too.'_


End file.
